Ray of HOPE
Ray Mears has spent decades honing his survival skills in wild places. Now, Britain’s foremost bushcraft expert wants to teach us how to save ourselves – by reconnecting with our feral side
When Ray Mears was a boy, he went camping on the North Downs. He didn’t have much kit and took a plastic bag to sleep in. “It turned out to be a disaster because I got totally wet,” he recalls. “But I don’t remember any hardship. I just remember adventure, feeling that I was in touch with something that other people weren’t.” While others sat at home watching television, Ray was “out in reality”. He felt privileged to be there.
Today, Ray Mears would like us all to experience that feeling, minus the sogginess of sleeping in a plastic bag. He worries that many of us have lost touch with our true selves. We need to get back to using our senses and reconnect with nature. “We are hunters and gatherers at heart,” he explains. “It’s only in modern times that we have changed our way of being.”
Ray lives with his wife Ruth in Sussex and has not renounced modern life. He is not off-grid nor is he self-sufficient. But he does draw solace and energy from his surroundings. This might be while he is tracking an animal for a TV documentary halfway across the world, watching a nuthatch in the oak tree outside his office or taking Jag, his Labrador, for a scamper in the woodland he has rewilded near his home.
He is encouraged by how much nature has helped so many of us in the past 18 months. “People have looked to nature for mental strength,” he says brightly. “Nature can be a wonderful panacea for stress.” But to make the most of it as everything opens up, we need to remember how that feels. As ordinary life makes demands on our time, we might need to make an effort to connect with what’s really important. It’s a case, Ray says, of being a passive observer. “The secret is to let nature into your heart,” he explains. “That starts by sitting quietly and allowing your ‘disturbance’ to evaporate. Then, little by little, you’ll hear the sounds of birds and wildlife coming closer to you.” Then you just have to look: “That way, you tune into the natural environment and become a part of it. And very quickly you forget the other things in the world that are going on.”
In Ray’s new book, We Are Nature, he writes about how important the senses are to him and warns us that we mustn’t forget to use them. They are, he says, “latent abilities… hidden within all of us from our hunter-gatherer past”. He extols the virtues of being “internally still” when you’re outdoors, achieving a sense of calm, deep within yourself. Nature, he says, then “accepts you and you accept it”.
We need to be in a “Zen-like state” so that we’re open to what’s around us. “You’re not actively searching for things,” he explains. “It’s about turning up the information your senses are receiving.” In daily life, we filter out information we don’t need such as
background noise when someone is talking to us: “What we need to do in nature is to stop for a moment and say to our cerebellum – let me hear, feel, touch…”
BACK TO NATURE
Ray has made his whole life about trying to be open to nature and use his senses. As an only child, he loved tracking foxes in the North Downs. Then, after he left school, he hoped to join the Royal Marines. He was turned down because of his eyesight, leading to a brief job in the City, before setting up Woodlore, a school of wilderness bushcraft, in East Sussex.
Since then, he has immersed himself in the outdoors, making more than 20 documentaries for television about wildlife and survival skills. He has stayed with reindeer herders in Siberia, discovered the menu of Stone Age man and picked berries with tribal women in Tanzania. As one of our top bushcraft experts, he has spent decades discovering, honing and passing on his skills so that we can appreciate the natural world.
Much is often made of Ray’s near brushes with the end, particularly an encounter with a saltwater crocodile in northern Australia. Using his own senses, the crocodile had sniffed out the remains of a stingray Ray had cooked earlier that day and Ray woke up to find the creature yards from his head. In response, he lay very still and the crocodile moved on. A calm approach, he explains, is vital when you’re around animals so that they don’t perceive you as a threat.
The most important feature of any adventure survival kit in less perilous circumstances, however, is a sense of humour because, at some point, things will go wrong. Your car could get stuck in a muddy ditch or, in Ray’s case when filming in Africa, his vehicle could get stuck in the desert. It’s easy, he admits, to get frustrated. Instead, you should “laugh at the situation and take a moment to relax. Quite often, when I’m travelling in real wilderness, I just put the kettle on. And normally, five minutes later, the solution presents itself.”
GO WILD
Ray is acutely aware that we are living at a crucial time for the environment: “I went somewhere I hadn’t visited [since childhood] recently and I was astonished at how small the wild bits had become. When I first went there, the wild areas felt like a cloak that I could put on and disappear into. Now that cloak is threadbare.” We have to decide to save it.
“I think we are becoming alert to the damage that we have wrought on the ecosystem,” he explains, “but I still fear that we see ourselves as superior… Animals, trees, birds, plants and fish are all living things that we share our lifetimes with. They are our brothers and sisters.” Ray recognises that we need to consume resources, but adds that we must do so carefully and respectfully: “If we feel this in our hearts, taking care of the environment will become second nature, the most normal and sensible thing in the world.”
He believes that if we take longer to observe and appreciate nature – “more keenly, more intimately” – we will understand it and feel closer to it. He talks about a time filming wolves in Idaho when he saw this first hand. Wolves were about to lose their legal protection and many locals, he explains, felt “a medieval hatred” towards them. “One day, I was observing an alpha male wolf with a spotting scope [a type of telescope] from a car park and this lady started to tell me how much she hated the wolves,” he recalls. Ray encouraged her to watch them. “You could hear her attitude to the wolf soften in her tone,” he says.
Ray is pragmatic about living with nature. He doesn’t think that we should live with wolves in the UK, or at least not yet. He supports rewilding, but it must be done sensibly. He is buoyed by many schemes over here, especially smaller, private projects, as well as the reintroduction of the beaver in Argyll, which he praises as “well-organised” and proceeding only after community consensus. Before reintroducing wolves or lynx, he explains, we would have to make sure we could live with predators like the golden eagle and the hen harrier, which are already persecuted. “We must understand wildlife on its own, honest terms.”
This will benefit us all. “The important thing is to enjoy nature,” he says. “We can all sit around and be miserable about the future, but if we don’t celebrate nature, why would we fight for it?” And the best way to do this is to use our senses. “When you use your senses, you’re scratching an itch, so you feel really good about it… Then, when you encounter something in nature, it’s wonderful.”
READ We Are Nature: How to Reconnect with the Wild by Ray Mears (Ebury Press, £20), out now. For more on Ray’s courses, see raymears.com.
“PEOPLE HAVE LOOKED TO NATURE FOR MENTAL STRENGTH IN RECENT MONTHS. IT CAN BE A WONDERFUL PANACEA FOR STRESS”
1964
Born in south London, Ray spends his childhood (above) tracking foxes on the North Downs
Early 1970s
Takes up judo and learns all he can from Kingsley Hopkins, his teacher who loves the outdoors
Late 1970s
Attends a seminar on planning a rainforest expedition. Most people are heavyweight researchers – Ray is 15, although just as serious
1982
Works in the City after he is turned down from the Royal Marines
1992
Publishes his first book,
The Outdoor Survival Handbook
1993
Starts Woodlore, the School of Wilderness Bushcraft, in East Sussex. Teaches Scouts survival skills (far left)
1997
Gets his own TV show, Ray Mears’ World of Survival (left)
2005
Survives a helicopter crash in the Rockies
2008
Wakes up to find a saltwater crocodile beside him while camping on the north Australian coast. Lies very still and shows the value of keeping calm
2013
Publishes his autobiography,
My Outdoor Life
2021
We Are Nature comes out. Plans a speaking tour for next year